`The District' Gets Smart -- Jean Smart

Names & Faces

Jean Smart hasn't had a TV show to call her own in three years, but she's kept busy leaving memorable impressions on the viewers of other stars' series.

Take Frasier on NBC, for instance, and her Emmy-winning portrayal last season of Lorna Gardner, Frasier's unrequited high-school crush who reappears in his life to fulfill some of his wildest fantasies and worst nightmares.

For Kelsey Grammer's Frasier, the divorced Lorna was sexy and still coquettish 20 years after she last romped and rah-rahed on the sidelines of their school football field. But toward others -- her kids on the phone, a total stranger in an elevator -- she was positively shrewish.

It was written as a one-shot role, the characters' relationship effectively over with mutual admissions that they were using each other. But executive producers David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee apparently still had a crush on Lorna, so Smart has returned to the Paramount set this month to shoot four more episodes expected to air in May.

Meanwhile, over at CBS' freshman drama The District, Smart has reprised her role as the ex-wife of police Chief Jack Mannion (Craig T. Nelson) -- this time as she prepared to get married.

Last summer, Smart wowed New York theatergoers in the limited-run Broadway revival of the 1939 Pulitzer-winning comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner, with Nathan Lane as the cantankerous Sheridan Whiteside. Smart wafted across the stage as one of his friends, gold-digging starlet Lorraine Sheldon.

It was yet another occasion for the 49-year-old, statuesque, curvaceous blond actress to make men's jaws drop even as they're laughing with appreciation at her exquisite comedic timing.

Asked what she thought about playing three such voluptuous dames in their 40s, Smart replied, "I was pretending they were in their 30s," and euphemistically characterized them as "no longer ingenues."

"I'm having a ball. How could I not?" she said. "I get to vamp it up and camp it up. And what's nice, too, about The District is that character is so down to earth. She's an ex-cop and she's a redhead. How could I say no to playing a redhead who packs a gun?"